3 is not a Crowd

Once, a couple of years before I met Peggy, a buddy of mine and I picked up a couple of semipro hookers at a bar over on York Avenue. They had an apartment together and we went there and smoked some hash. I was just getting into grass at the time and had never had hashish, and we all got beautifully high. The girls asked if we wanted to see a show, and we said sure, and they got undressed and one of them made love to the other one. Kissed her, felt her up, ate her out, then strapped on a dildo and socked it to her.

I suppose the hash must have had something to do with it, but it was the most wildly exciting time I ever had. I wanted desperately to screw them, I wanted to grow an extra cock so I could screw them both at once, but at the same time I wanted it to go on forever, to watch them forever.

Finally they were done, and my buddy grabbed one of them and I grabbed the other, and we screwed them, and then we switched girls and screwed some more, and then we got the girls to do their thing some more, and we just kept switching back and forth and screwing them all night.

I never ran into either of them again. I went back to that bar a couple of times but never saw them. I couldn’t go to the apartment because I wasn’t sure where the hell it was. As I said, we all got pretty well stoned.

When Peggy did her confession number, of course I immediately thought of that evening, which I don’t think I had told her about before—

PEGGY: You hadn’t.

JERRY: That’s what I thought. My mind went back to it, and I imagined her and Kay doing what the two whores had done, and I got very excited. I wanted to hear everything, wanted to know all the details.

PEGGY: His interest was damn near clinical.

JERRY: We wound up in bed, of course. We were never lousy in bed, but this particular time was better than usual. Quite sensational.

Afterward, when the glow wore off, she was convinced she had made a mistake telling me about it. That whether or not it excited me, I would lose respect for her because of what I knew about her. This just wasn’t so, and I think I made her realize it. I told her I thought lesbians were a groove. I said I had to admit that I found faggots generally off-putting, and that might be because of hang-ups of my own, but that I frankly dug lesbians and felt that a girl didn’t lose any of her femininity by having that kind of an experience. I think this is true in a way that it isn’t for male homosexuals. I think they give up masculinity. But if anything, I find a girl more desirable as a result of lesbian experiences.

KAY: That could be one of your hang-ups, too.

JERRY: No doubt about it. Remember, our neuroses are the only thing that separates us from the apes.

But ever after that night my wife was just a little more exciting to me. She was exciting enough to begin with—

PEGGY: Thanks.

JERRY: —but this was icing on the cake. I do a lot of my living in fantasy — I think a majority of creative people do — and I would have fantasies in which Kay and Peggy and I would romp together. And of course I was seeing Kay in a new light now. I remembered being attracted to her the one time I met her, and now I was including her in a variety of fantasies.

PEGGY: You were doing more than having fantasies.

JERRY: What do you mean?

PEGGY: You wanted to go into the city and pick up a whore and bring her out here and have us both make love to her.

JERRY: Oh, I was joking.

PEGGY: You pretended you were joking, and I pretended that I knew you were joking, and you were like hell joking. You were trying it on, love.

JERRY: Well, if you had gone along with it, I certainly would have had no objection.

PEGGY: That’s not joking, then.

JERRY: Maybe not.

PEGGY: You also told me that if I ever wanted to see a girl on my own you would have no objection.

JERRY: Well, I was just being decent.

PEGGY: I’m not sure that’s the word for it.

JERRY: Oh, cut the shit. That was altruistic, as a matter of fact. I just wanted you to know that if you ever got the yen you shouldn’t hold yourself back out of concern for how I might feel about it, that you didn’t have to tell me and could do what you wanted with a clear conscience. You can’t make me the heavy for that.

PEGGY: I know. It’s just that something like that, some idiot Village pickup or some orgy with a hired whore, I mean that was the last thing I could possibly want and I was a little disgusted that you thought I might want it.

JERRY: Didn’t you ever want it?

PEGGY: No.

JERRY: You never wanted a girl after we were married?

PEGGY: No.

JERRY: You must have thought about it.

PEGGY: Of course I thought about it. When we went to a party and some men made a pass at me I thought about that, too, but that didn’t mean I had the slightest interest in having an affair. I didn’t, whether with a man or a woman. I was perfectly happy with just you, hard as it may be for you to believe it.